Number of Special Interests Vying to Influence Health Reform Legislation Swelled As Debate Dragged On

Time has rarely been an ally of President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats seeking to enact comprehensive health care reform. And the longer they took, the larger the army of special interest lobbyists grew.

During the course of 2009, the number of corporations, trade associations and other organizations that disclosed lobbying on the health care reform bills grew at an astounding rate, according to a new Center for Responsive Politics analysis of lobbying reports filed with the Senate Office of Public Records.

By the end of the fourth quarter when both the House and the Senate adopted versions of the bill, the number of clients had increased by nearly 300 percent, the Center for Responsive Politics found — up to 1,541 clients.

In contrast, just 398 lobbying clients during the first quarter of 2009 had filed reports that mentioned the Democrats’ health care reform proposals.

These figures are based on an analysis of LD-2 lobbying reports that mention the official bill numbers of the Democrats’ plans or phrases that described the legislation or the bills’ official titles — such as “health care reform,” “affordable health” or “healthy future” — in the specific issue field.

The exact number of organizations lobbying on health care reform as Democrats make what they hope will be their final push will not be known until the next batch of reports are filed in late April, but there is little reason to think that the level of lobbying activity will have abated.

Fully 17 percent of the clients that disclosed lobbying on health care reform during the fourth quarter of 2009 represented new clients who had not previously reported lobbying on this legislation, the Center for Responsive Politics found.

In all, 1,750 corporations or other groups reported lobbying on health care reform legislation at some point during 2009. That is, 11 percent of all groups that lobbied the federal government last year lobbied on health care reform.

Interested in checking up on other companies to see if they lobbied on the health care reform bills? Download the spreadsheet that lists these 1,750 organizations, along with information about which quarters they disclosed lobbying on the health reform legislation. And if you use our data, please make sure to credit the Center for Responsive Politics: HCR Clients.xls

As the health care reform debate has evolved over the past year, multiple legislative proposals were debated and lobbied on, as each chamber and each committee with jurisdiction over health care reform weighed in.

The Center for Responsive Politics searched the lobbying data maintained by the Senate Office of Public Records for records that mentioned these bills in the specific issue field of the LD-2 form.

This “specific issue field” is designed as a place for lobbyists to identify the bill number, bill title and other additional information about their activities. The amount of additional information detailed in this field, however, can vary and is subject to human error on the part of filers. Lobbyists are not required to provide such details in a standardized format, so any search of this information may not perfectly capture all lobbying activity.

All in all, the 1,750 clients identified by the Center spent more than $1.1 billion on all federal lobbying and hired more than 5,300 lobbyists for their work. Lobbying disclosure rules do not require an itemization of how much money was spent per issue, so it is impossible to discern how much of this sum was spent strictly on health care reform lobbying.

Similarly, the overall figure of lobbyists represents all individuals hired by companies to carry out all priorities; the database maintained by the Senate Office of Public Records does not allow one to tie together a client’s lobbyists and the specific issues fields of the lobbying forms.

These numbers include all federal lobbying, including other high-profile legislative battles, such as the stimulus, cap-and-trade climate legislation, financial regulatory reform and the Employee Free Choice Act regarding unionization in the workplace.

Media Contact

Viveca Novak
(202) 354-0111
press@crp.org

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